Bill Evans was never my cup of tea. I have one Nardis version of him on an enja record together with Eggi Gomez and Tony Oxley. But i have to play it to remember how it goes. Nothing etched in the synapses of my base brain.

Not so with the Coltrane tune you mention. Of course i know it, don't tell your Grandma how to steal Coltrane records .... oops ... horses
Originally issued on impulse A-10 ... and believe me, it has to be the black-orange mono pressing .
Coltrane is among my absolute undisputed favourites (wrong, he is among my gurus) and i am particularly fond of Coltrane's soprano play. But on this record, before "Softly as in a morning sunrise" there it this tune called "Spiritual", Trane plays it on tenor and Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet. Listening to "Spiritual" makes me cry tears of joy everytime. Not so with "Softly as in a morning sunrise", i like it very much but, to be honest, i prefer the Rollins performance.

The "Softly as in a morning sunrise" from Sonny Rollins is a stunner for me, big fat juicy and really original. And improvsation fits more to the original standard theme.
From the beginners POV: Rollins keeps in touch with the original theme (best observable on Saxophone Colossus, "Blue Seven"), Trane not always ... he seems to orbit away from it.

remp,
i have a soundcard, just to lazy/occupied to properly install it. Tried it once, disappointing. Now i am hunting a soundcard, with all possible inputs to be able to put vinyl to the computer. I need an SPDIF input for harddisk recording. >US$30, i am sure.

This was my pathetic attempt at a joke. Computers don't have a record player built in.

My Yamaha sound card has a stereo line input for recording from your vinyl's. I have not tried it out but imagine it takes in analogue and stores it on your hard disc as .wav or .mp3 or some other format. Might need helper software.

remp,
got your joke
.... putting vinyl to the computer via the soundcard's phono input stage is really pathetic. I do not even consider that, got it demoed once, "as a proof how crappy vinyl sounds". What a simple mind , this guy. Sonics indeed were not pleasant.

Now how i want to do it:
have a decent analog2digital converter unit outside the computer and with a separate analog PS, having a properly designed input buffer stage (tube or SS, whatever) and handing out the digital data in SPDIF format (SPDIF is crap for playback but wonderful for recording, the master clock sits piggyback on the ADC chip anyway).

Then the SPDIF is handed to the digital input of the soundcard and no computer-generated RF hash (strayed in or coming via the power supply backdoor) is polluting the audio signal ---because its digital.

### edit dice45 ###
got a bad conscience , threadjacking and stuff, could we go back to MIDI? I could pull a copy of the vinyl=>harddisk discussion to the new Musical Instruments board.

### edit2 dice45 ###
Now i have a really bad conscience. .. I have failed to meet educative standards.

Did i say it has to be done that way? All i can read and remember is: I want to do it that way.

For the record, i sometimes am not protected form my own prejudices. Among these prejudices: i am afraid, wrong, scared, to use the analog section of a soundcard including the input connectors, electrolytic coupling caps and so on. And i am scared about the radiofrequency hash coupling into that stage. For me it does not matter that much if it's phono MM or line level. I tried line level out ys ago with an old soundblaster AWG32 and did not like it, to put it politely. As it is ys ago, as the used SC is obsolete, as acoustic memory is fading anyway, that's irrelevant.

For the record:
of course it is possible to feed the phono preamp's line signal into the soundcard's line input. Anyone should try that path who wants to try out how vinyl recordings can be harddisk-recorded and post-processed to remove clicks and noise and rumble. It does not cost a fortune and creates 1st experiences and a certain grasp on the topic.
Later on, if vinyl has proven to be an alternative signal source worth considering, one of the next steps could be to build a decent phono preamplifier, to get a better soundcard, to buy or build a decent turntable and so on.
One other option is to use the recorded phono signal for sampling and altering and create new music from it.

To get the phono signal via preamplifier and SC line input on the harddisk, no additional software should be needed. But to get rid of pops, clicks noise, software like Steinberg's Clean! and Syntrillion's CoolEdit are proven to be very helpful without deterioating sonics all too much.
Albeit Clean! is particulary made for that purpose, CoolEdit has the better reputation to leave sonics unaltered. Concerning sampling and altering and working with wave tables , CoolEdit has an outrigth fancy rep considering its price.
So i have been informed by harddisk recording experts.